Along these lines, in 2007, Germany initiated a major shift toward a new “sustainable family policy” model that promotes mothers’ continuous employment, invests heavily in early childhood education services rather than giving cash to families, and generally endorses a dual-earner family model—a striking break from the previous policy regime. Whether the intentions stem from pronatalist, economic, and/or feminist motives, the court decision in favor of the Leipzig mothers signals to German mothers that they can and should be able to return to work after giving birth, and the government has a duty to facilitate their entry back into the labor market. By providing universal public child care, and giving parents the legal right to sue if they can’t access this service, it sends the message that the answer to “who should care for children?” is, in part, the government.

The German example serves as quite the counterpoint to America’s current approach to this question. Securing daycare in the U.S. is, to be blunt, a nightmare. The U.S. has no universal child care prior to the start of elementary school, which begins around age five. Even then, there is no universal program once school lets out. Without a public option the vast majority of families have to find private solutions. (The limited federal child-care and early education provisions like the Head Start program are largely means-tested for the poorest citizens.)

Families that must turn to the market find vast differences in the cost, quality, and availability of care. These disparities are chronicled in The New America Care Report, which finds that full-time center-based daycare runs an average of $9,589 a year for children ages 0 to 4 in the U.S.—higher than the average cost of in-state college tuition—and costs much more in dense urban areas. Until as recently as 2013, there were no national regulations governing quality of service, staffing, or health codes for daycare facilities, and, as a result, the options were all over the map, both in terms of standards and outcomes. The sociologists Julia Wrigley at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Joanna Dreby at The University at Albany SUNY found that the death rate for infants was seven times higher in home-care settings than in daycare centers. The lack of regulations for child-care standards means that wealthier families are able to provide safer, higher quality environments for their children than lower-income families.

The U.S.’s laissez-faire approach to child care also creates dramatic disparities across the socioeconomic spectrum with regard to mothers’ labor-force participation. Both wealthy and poor women often face child-care difficulties and inflexible workplaces in the United States. But their options to resolve these problems couldn’t be more different. Higher-income mothers can more easily leverage their resources to pay for (safer, better, more reliable) child-care solutions, while poor mothers cannot. Higher-income mothers are also more likely to be employed in occupations that offer job security and policies like paid maternity leave or employer-sponsored child care. Given the prohibitively high cost of daycare, lower-income mothers may leave the labor force in order to care for their children themselves. Sociologists have documented how detrimental these job turnovers following childbirth can be for mothers because they tend to spur a “downward spiral” in occupational achievement and lifetime earnings. Limited access to child care hampers economic growth more broadly because it inhibits parents’ ability to participate in the paid labor force.